


Trust Me: Just Follow the Blood

by TheIcyQueen



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Banter, Blood, F/M, Fade Rifts, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Pre-Dragon Age: Inquisition Quest - Here Lies the Abyss, Rescue Missions, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29069661
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheIcyQueen/pseuds/TheIcyQueen
Summary: If there's one thing Varric's learned, it's that nothing is ever a coincidence when Hawke is involved. So when a group of Inquisition scouts goes missing after the destruction of Haven AND Hawke's letters stop coming AND she never arrives at Skyhold? Yeah, he knows something's up. Good thing there's a foolproof way to find her no matter how far she roams: Just follow the blood. Works every time.
Relationships: Female Hawke/Varric Tethras, Hawke/Varric Tethras
Comments: 10
Kudos: 12
Collections: Hightown Funk 2020





	Trust Me: Just Follow the Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anxiouspineapples](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anxiouspineapples/gifts).



> A Hightown Funk "treat" for anxiouspineapples! I saw the words "darker twist to an Inquisition event" used in a prompt, and hoo boy, I absolutely couldn't pass that up!

_I think we can both agree I don’t usually ask for shit like this,_ he thought to himself, eyes squinched tight against the driving snow, _But Maker, if you’re listening up there, I could really use some kind of sign, here. If she’s all right—and damn it, she better be all right—a sign…well a sign would just be great_.

After another beat he opened his eyes, and…there it was. There was his sign, maybe not directly in front of him but close enough for his taste, and as he stopped to look down at it, the leather of his gloves straining with each flex of his fingers, he found he couldn’t help but laugh. Didn’t that just figure.

“You okay there?” Harding asked, and, knowing full well what he must’ve looked like in that moment as he stared down into the bloodstained snow, Varric appreciated the levity she’d somehow managed to keep in her voice.

“Yeah,” he said, reaching up to run one of his hands across his face. “Yup. Just…we had this running joke back in Kirkwall.”

“Hmm?”

“If you wanted to find Hawke, all you had to do was, uh…” He sniffed then, dropping his hand to his side as he finally managed to tear his eyes away from the freezing mess on the ground. “Follow the blood.”

Beside him, Harding was quiet for a second. _Only_ a second. She was quick like that—a fact that he was coming to appreciate more and more the longer this mission dragged on. “Guess you had to be there, huh?”

“Hey, I never said it was a _funny_ joke, I just said it was _a_ joke. Kirkwall wasn’t an especially humorous place. We took what we could get, in terms of out-and-out hilarity.”

“Apparently. But it looks like there’s plenty of the stuff for us to follow, so…” She flashed him a sympathetic smile for all of a second before he noticed the way the corners of her mouth had tightened. It was, to be sure, a _lot_ of blood. “Buck up. And,” Harding leaned in just enough to lower her voice into a more confidential register, “Good luck.”

He didn’t ask what she meant by that—he didn’t _need_ to. He’d felt Cassandra’s glare hot on the back of his neck since they’d left Skyhold, and the few times he’d made the mistake of turning her way to check the damage, he’d found himself on the receiving end of a scowl so intense he’d been genuinely concerned it might set him on fire. Any second now, he thought, he’d glance down and find himself smoldering and smoking.

“You _knew_ ,” the Seeker said stiffly as he fell in line with the rest of the team, following the thin path that Nightingale’s people had managed to clear out before them. It was the thousandth time she’d said it (not that he’d been counting), and even so, she somehow managed to weigh down every word with as much scorn and fury as though it were the first. It was like she thought he’d been hiding Hawke in Haven all along, like the two of them had been having a merry old time of it and he’d simply neglected to tell anyone else, or that he’d been keeping her in plain sight only to wave his hands and cause a distraction whenever someone came too close to recognizing her.

It was, in a word, exhausting. And not what he needed just then.

Varric took a deep breath but held his tongue. He’d given her his answer already, and he wasn’t particularly in the mood to repeat himself—even if _she_ was. He _had_ known, of course…it was ridiculous to think even for a minute that he _hadn’t!_ Hell, when he’d finished recounting the tragic story of Kirkwall back there in the Hawke estate all that time ago, he’d been _gobsmacked_ to see she’d _believed_ him. To hear that whole tale and then to think he’d be able to get a single night’s sleep without knowing where she was?! To listen to him talk on and on about Hawke and her tenacity and spirit and skill and strength and…

His chest clenched a bit as he thought on it. As he thought on _Hawke._ No, no, if he started doing that the memories would come flooding back and he knew from experience that once that dam broke, it took a hell of a long time to build it up again. If he started thinking about the story he’d fed Cassandra, he’d start thinking about the story he _hadn’t_ told her, the parts he’d skipped.

The parts about _them_.

So it was easier to leave it be. Suffice it to say that after her wholesale acceptance of his tale, he didn’t have an especially high opinion of the Seeker of Truth’s ability to, hmm, _seek the truth_. But to be fair—to be fair!—he hadn’t known _exactly_ where Hawke had ended up. It wasn’t like he could’ve pointed to a spot on a map and told them which house to check, but he’d had an idea. Mostly he’d just known she was somewhere safe, and really, that was all that mattered.

“Damn.” Blackwall’s voice was low as they entered the ruin that had once been Haven, and though he still didn’t speak up, Varric had to agree.

There was something eerie about the scene even from outside the gates, snow and stone piled in places that once had been familiar. Every so often they’d pass a cairn or something like one, and it was hard to peel their eyes away from the mounds of snow they marked. Where there _weren’t_ cairns, there were instead brutal shards of lyrium jutting out from snow banks, catching the sun to dapple the ground in blood-colored light. _More to follow,_ he thought to himself, and once again felt his guts twist into knots.

Hawke had been somewhere _safe_ …and then he’d asked her to come join them at Skyhold.

His plan (inasmuch as it could really be called a “plan”) had been fairly straightforward. But somewhere between its two key steps—(1) point Hawke towards Skyhold, and (2) meet Hawke at Skyhold—there’d been a snag. Well, all right, there’d been a _few_ snags. She’d never arrived, that had been the big one. A week had passed, then a week and change, and still there had been no sign of her, no word _from_ her, and that…that wasn’t like Hawke. When the second week came and went without her, he’d had no choice; he’d told the others.

He’d known Curly wasn’t going to take it too well, and he wasn’t a moron so he’d known Cassandra wouldn’t be especially thrilled to learn he’d been lying to her, but that just meant he’d been able to brace himself against the tidal wave of their combined fury and bone-deep exasperation. What he _hadn’t_ been prepared for, what he _couldn’t_ have been prepared for, was Leliana’s thoughtful silence…followed by her revelation (delivered in only the most measured, confidential tone) that a small group of her people had been silent from out of Haven for roughly the same amount of time.

So a crew had been assembled to head down the mountain. No one was willing to believe it was mere coincidence—not with _Hawke_ involved. Nothing was _ever_ a coincidence where Hawke was involved.

Now, as they made their way into the place that had once served as their home, it became clear that finding Nightingale’s people wasn’t going to be a problem. It was the state of them that posed an issue. Following the blood had been all well and good, but as it turned out, it wasn’t Hawke it had led them to.

It seemed the scouts had done a fairly decent job of making camp among the wreckage, but it was obvious that during the course of their stay, something had changed. The snow was muddled red even in those places where there was no lyrium to blame, packed and ridged with bootprints enough to suggest an army. Worse still, beside the lean-to they had been using as shelter, tucked almost (but not completely) out of sight, were two canvas-covered lumps. No cairns for them…not yet, at least.

“Inquisition!” Cassandra called ahead, her voice a whipcrack in the chilly silence, and more than a few of them cringed at the echo that answered back, the memory of the avalanche they’d only narrowly avoided before still fresh.

He’d been silent up until then, but with a slow look around the remains of the town, Solas finally spoke. “The Veil,” he began in that inscrutable way of his, “Is—”

“Gonna go out on a limb and make a guess here…it’s weak, isn’t it?” The joke tasted like ash in his mouth, but that wasn’t anything new. Varric didn’t need the mage there to tell him something was wrong—the whole _place_ was wrong, everything about it was wrong, from the blood to the graves to the horrendous whisper-song coming off the lyrium whenever the wind blew.

Solas didn’t acknowledge his flippancy. “It is not just _weak_ , but _ephemeral,_ ” he said, lowering his voice with all the caution of a man stepping into an enemy encampment, “Almost as though _waiting_ to tear open, held together by a gossamer thread—”

“Seeker Pentaghast! Oh thank the Maker.” And there they were, a skeleton crew at best, their faces windburnt but relieved as they filed out of their lean-to, most appearing battered but no worse for wear. None of them looked a whit like Hawke.

“What…happened here?” Cassandra asked, concern at least momentarily supplanting her anger.

“We ran into some trouble, ser,” a gaunt-faced scout answered as though it hadn’t been apparent, their eyes flicking briefly to their fellows as though warning against any histrionics. “We were meant to catalogue the dead and salvage what we could, but there were…complications.”

“Complications?” Harding asked, her eyes on the lumps under the canvas tarp.

“A rift opened _out of nowhere_ ,” another scout interjected, a scraggly young human with a nasty cut running across one of his cheekbones, “And the things that spilled out of it…the cold and the red lyrium were bad enough on their own, but with the rift opening…” His voice cut out for a moment, not breaking so much as disappearing entirely.

“Have you seen anyone else come through this way?” Varric asked, telling himself he didn’t notice the sharp looks the others shot his way. He hadn’t _meant_ to interrupt the poor kid, he really hadn’t, but with the way things were looking, his thoughts were with Hawke more than ever. He couldn’t shake the awful sense of guilt he’d been contending with since her letters had stopped: She’d been _safe_ , and now she _wasn’t_ , and it was all because he’d asked her to leave. “Hunters? Caravans? Anyone?”

“No…? Well, the…the Wardens, I guess, but—”

“ _Wardens?_ ” the suspicion in Cassandra’s voice put an end to whatever the scout had mumbled after that. “Grey Wardens?”

“Aye,” another one of the scouts said, jerking a thumb towards what remained of the Chantry. “Three of ‘em. Fereldan, by the sounds of it. Well… _mostly_ Fereldan. The one might be Orlesian, but he doesn’t talk much, so I’m not terribly sure. Came right in the nick of time, they did—if it hadn’t been for them, we would’ve been rightly fu…er…”

“Wardens,” Cassandra repeated, “There are _Wardens_ here?” She turned to look at the rest of them, and for the first time since their departure, it seemed the worst of her fury had been extinguished. In its place was suspicion, plain and simple.

It was a very poorly kept secret, of late, that just about every Warden in Thedas had managed to drop off the map. Finding Blackwall had been equal parts luck and sheer determination on the part of Leliana and her people, so for any Warden—much less _more than one_ —to appear in Haven…well, the coincidences just kept adding up, didn’t they?

Without another word (save, of course, for one of her usual grunts of frustration), Cassandra started for the Chantry, leaving the rest of them to follow after her. When she’d gotten a good few strides ahead of them, Varric pointedly cleared his throat. “Any ideas of who we might be dealing with, Hero? They’re _your_ people.”

“None,” Blackwall admitted. “Without a Blight, groups don’t follow. We…tend to keep to ourselves.”

“A senior Warden with new recruits, perhaps?” Solas asked, his eyes never remaining on one object for too long. He seemed terribly distracted by their surroundings, Varric thought, looking from grave marker to grave marker, ruin to ruin, gruesome shard of lyrium to gruesome shard of lyrium, appearing as though he were trying to memorize each and every detail of the scene.

There was a moment of silence…and then a thoughtful sound from Blackwall. “Suppose that’s _possible_ ,” he said after a beat, and it was difficult to place, but there was something about his tone that struck Varric as strange. Tense, maybe. Uncertain. Not _doubtful_ , per se, but something like it.

“Wardens!” Cassandra called as they neared the patched and worn pair of tents tucked away beside the Chantry. “On behalf of the Inquisi—”

He heard Solas’s sharp intake of breath before he saw what had caused it.

A large, furry head appeared from inside one of the tents, its ears laid flat against its skull and its hackles raised to show a terrifyingly muscular jaw full of teeth. The mabari took a step out into the daylight, paused as it caught sight of them, and then, as though by magic, its demeanor changed to that of an excitable pup. It bounded over to their group, the nub of its tail wagging furiously, and…Maker, he’d never been any great shake at telling mabari apart, but as it came over to him, tongue lolling out of its great, menacing mouth, it sure bore a hell of a resemblance to Dog.

Varric couldn’t help the smile or the laugh that came to him, unbidden, at the thought. “The scouts _did_ say they were Fereldan,” he chuckled, “We should’ve known. Fereldans and their damn dogs…” He watched as Cassandra skirted around the massive war hound to approach the tents and then took it upon himself to scratch the great lumbering mutt’s ears. Up close, the damn thing only looked _more_ like Dog, though perhaps a bit older, a bit more grey, and…huh. “What’s the matter, Chuckles?” he teased, only half-paying attention to the others as he pet the mabari, trying to tamp down the traitorous little flicker of hope the ugly mutt and its wagging tail had lit inside of him. “You seem tense.”

“I am…not a great lover of dogs,” Solas said stiffly, making a point to take a few steps to the side. “Particularly ones as large as—”

It was difficult to say which came first: the ripple that pulsed through the air, moving like a living, breathing thing with a heartbeat and a will all its own…or the shouts.

“That’s trouble,” Blackwall managed to get out just before the air of what had once been Haven’s square shimmered, shook, and then split like a piece of old cheesecloth.

The first monstrosity the rift birthed was a sound. A scream, chilling in its emptiness, its refusal to be identified. It was the sound of the Fade, he had to figure, the hissing of wind never meant to cross the Veil, the shrieking of a world never meant to be seen by their likes in the light of day.

The second monstrosity the rift birthed was _fire_. Rage. Its body glowed and dimmed, glowed and dimmed, freezing black and ashen where the snow touched it only to burn brighter and hotter a moment later, as though purely out of spite. It crawled forth— _oozed_ forth—with the boneless, squelching movements of magma running down a mountainside, the snow hissing and turning to steam beneath its horrible weight. The scouts were on it in an instant, blades drawn and arrows nocked…

But then the air pulsed again, heaving as the world itself seemed to fold in around them.

The third monstrosity the rift birthed threatened to block out the sun itself.

“Well…shit,” Varric breathed, Bianca already in his arms, cocked and locked and ready for what came next.

Rage and Pride. They should’ve known. After what had happened there in Haven, Corypheus’s decimation of their people and the Inquisitor’s unexpected (if pyrrhic) victory over him, Maker knew there was more than enough of both of those lingering in the air to gorge whatever demons sniffed it out.

In a flash of blue and silver the Wardens overtook them, running past what remained of Threnn’s requisitions table and the thatched buildings that had once given them shelter. They bounded towards the fray with their weapons out and the mabari hot on their heels, and in a matter of seconds the air was rent by the sounds of metal on flesh and otherworldly roars of fury.

It didn’t matter how many of the damn things he’d seen during his time with the Inquisition: He would never get used to seeing rifts. The way the air shimmered around them, the awful, reaching tendrils of energy creeping out of them like roots…and the demons, obviously. The demons probably should’ve ranked a little higher on the list. As he watched, the oozing form of Rage pulled itself towards one of the Wardens, the snow hissing and steaming under its heat to reveal to its brethren the frozen bodies the avalanche had buried. His stomach lurched when he saw the first corpse twitch, then flex, then begin to right itself.

This was going to be a mess. The thought was not lost on him that this search and rescue would’ve been a hell of a lot easier had they actually brought the _one_ person able to _close_ rifts…but something about the sight of Cassandra with her sword unsheathed kept him from voicing _that_ particular gripe. Instead he did what he did best, and fired off a bolt into a shade just as it came through from the Fade, ending its existence before it could so much as accustom itself to the sunlight.

The air to his left crackled with the familiar buzz of magic about to be cast, and not knowing whether it was friend or foe, his muscle memory took over and he dodged the spell as he’d dodged so many before when fighting alongside Hawke. And oh, that was the wrong thought to cross his mind at that moment, because all at once he was remembering every witty aside, every inappropriate quip, every breathless laugh that had filled the streets of Kirkwall when someone had been foolish enough to raise their blade to her. He could only _imagine_ how Hawke would be handling _this_ particular scrape, how she’d roll her eyes to meet his with a barbed smirk, muttering some awful joke or pun under her breath before leaping into the—

That time he didn’t dodge an attack but a _person_ , and…all right, that was admittedly a new one.

He hadn’t seen the blow Pride had landed on the Warden mage, but it must’ve been a real doozy because they positively _flew_ through the air like a child’s discarded doll, the powdery impact of their body hitting the snow punctuated by their breath leaving them in a loud whoop.

“You all right back there?” Varric called over his shoulder, wincing as he watched the form of a shambling corpse in Inquisition-issued leathers crumple against Blackwall’s shield. He forced himself to look away and load up another bolt to prepare for the next wave.

The Warden heaved a heavy breath before responding, sounding _strangely_ upbeat for someone who’d just been turned into a living projectile. “Me? Oh, I’m fine! Nothing hurt but my pride! There’s some sort of irony there, I’m sure…mmm, know what? On second thought, I suppose my tailbone’s seen better days…”

At first he just scoffed back, relieved he wouldn’t have to be the one to mark yet another body’s final resting place. But then it clicked in his mind, what he’d just heard.

_Who_ he’d just heard.

In terms of battle stratagem, turning one’s back on a pair of demons and their hangers-on was generally considered unwise. That didn’t stop Varric from doing it, though, whipping around to get a better look at the mage. “ _Hawke?!”_

Lo and behold, there she was, her dark hair tousled as she lay sprawled out in the snow wearing armor that decidedly wasn’t hers, a winged (and now dented) helmet lying uselessly cast off to her side. “Sorry,” she quipped, scrambling to get a firm grip on her staff once more, “Afraid this is a bad time for autogra—Varric?” He saw her pause, her arm still reaching, and she blinked a few times as though to clear her vision before repeating, “ _Varric?!_ ”

In two steps he was beside her, snow-blind and dizzy and numb in the best of ways, the rush of his relief deafening him to the chaos of the fight. “What are you _doing here?!_ ” he asked, mouth moving of its own volition, the question merely the first to wrench itself apart from the millions of others buzzing around in his head.

“Oh, you know,” she said breezily, her smile wide and her eyes glimmering mischievously, “Killing some demons, seeing the sights…nothing out of the ordinary. What are _you_ doing here?”

“ _Looking for you!_ What am I doing here…Maker’s ba—” but then, impossibly, he was laughing, stooping to help her up. “Are you actually hurt or can you keep going?”

She didn’t answer him right away. Instead she just _beamed_ up at him from the snow, her nose crinkling, her eyes bright as sapphires in the sun; it was, he had to figure, probably much the same way _he_ was looking at _her_ , just so glad to be reunited, so relieved to know the other was all right. And then, before he could completely register what was happening, she’d taken his face in her hands. Then she was kissing him, her lips full and smiling against his, and when she pulled away she was laughing, the sound of it like Chantry bells on a warm spring evening.

“Sorry,” Hawke said as though _she’d_ only just realized what she’d done. “I guess that was probably a little—”

Varric pulled her back into the kiss without so much as a single thought, ending her apology right then and there. She threw her arms around his neck to bring herself closer, thereby shaking _both_ their centers of balance and toppling them down into the snow, and _still_ he barely noticed. In that moment, that instant, all that mattered was that she was okay—she was whole and alive and _right there_ , solid in his arms and warm against his skin. The only things that meant _anything_ were that they knew that they had more time, that they’d have tomorrow, that he was kissing her and she was kissing him back, that maybe he hadn’t been wrong in letting himself believe the things he’d read between the lines of her letters and maybe she’d noticed all the things he’d left unsaid in his.

“Do. You. _Mind?!_ ”

The frustration in the voice wasn’t a surprise. The voice itself, however, was a different story.

Varric looked up in time to watch one of the Wardens slice through an errant corpse that had been staggering its way towards him and Hawke, and even through the helmet the warrior wore, he recognized the exasperation immediately. “ _Junior?_ Well I’ll be damned! Look at you with your fancy—”

Carver groaned aloud at the nickname he’d clearly been hoping to outgrow, turning towards the two of them only long enough to thrust his sword arm out towards the others in the square, all of whom were still…

“Oh.”

“Ah, right,” Hawke joked. “The demons.”

“Yes,” Carver growled, “The demons! Now if you’d kindly stop… _doing that_ and actually _help_ …”

Once Carver had returned to the fray, Hawke began to slowly ease herself to her feet, snickering all the while. “Uh oh…looks like someone’s not too happy you were kissing his sister…”

“He’s survived worse.”

“Don’t tell him that. Doesn’t need more of a complex than he already has.”

Maybe it was a ridiculous way of thinking, inappropriately nostalgic given the circumstances, but shit, he was a writer, and no stranger to purple prose; from that point on, it was as though the clouds had parted and the sun shone brighter, and the thin winter air of the mountains became refreshing instead of chilling. Like a well oiled machine they fell into the old patterns again, the steps far from forgotten, and for an instant they were slicing through abominations in Darktown or combatting something awful inside one of Sundermount’s caves. It was familiar, fighting alongside Hawke, familiar and comforting in the way the sound of the Waking Sea crashing against the city walls had always been. For a moment—just a moment—it was almost like being home.

By the time they managed to fell the demons, Rage had managed to melt away its fair share of snow, Pride cutting through all that it uncovered. But still, fall they did, one after the other, and when the last of the shades had crumpled, useless and hollow in a world that wasn’t theirs, the rift shrank and puckered and finally shut. It didn’t close completely, he wasn’t sure any of them ever truly did, but instead left a deep, gangrenous scar in the air itself, promising to open wide like a dragon’s maw once it had time enough to rest.

Varric made a mental note to suggest they head out before that could happen. He turned to Hawke, finding it still impossible to keep from grinning, and the wave of relief that overtook him as she met his gaze with that smirk of hers was nearly enough to knock him clean off his feet again.

“Ugh. Now that we’ve—Hawke?” The shock was evident in Cassandra’s voice, though Varric was _delighted_ to find it tempered by something like excitement (or literal _glee_ ) as she recognized precisely who it was standing alongside him.

Inclining her head in a mocking little bow, Hawke smiled. “Seeker Pentaghast, I take it? Glad to finally be able to put a face to the many, many…” she paused, flashing Varric a wicked smirk that immediately transported him back to Lowtown, filling his chest and stomach with warmth, “… _many_ stories I’ve heard.” She turned to the others, clearly trying to identify them but falling short.

“Champion,” Harding said, her head nod significantly less sarcastic than Hawke’s had been.

“…people I don’t know,” she said by way of greeting, her cheer somehow making it work. She turned to face the rest of them more fully, patting Dog’s head as he nosed at her palm. “May I be the first to say I am both honored _and_ humbled that the Inquisition would deploy such capable and competent—”

His tone dull as the edge of a newly forged blade, Carver interrupted, speaking to Cassandra as though her being identified as a Seeker somehow made her their de facto leader. “We were passing through on our way to Skyhold. Noticed some trouble with your scouts, so we thought we’d lend a hand.”

“Your efforts are appreciated, of course,” Cassandra said slowly, _distractedly_ , and Varric had to quite literally bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing outright at the look on Carver’s face; he may have been older, and maybe his armor was nicer, but the indignant, unimpressed younger-brother expression was still there clear as day as the Seeker spoke to him but kept her eyes on Hawke. “You’ve…joined the Grey Wardens?” she said after a beat, and that was when the third Warden, the one who hadn’t said much, took his own helmet off.

“Maker,” breathed Jean-Marc Stroud, a face Varric hadn’t seen in quite some time, “Don’t even joke about such things.”

Beaming, Hawke basked in his distress. “Could you _imagine?_ ”

“I’d take a Blight over _that_ any day,” Carver added, shaking his head as his sister nudged him with her arm. “Well, I _would_.”

“No, no…” Hawke waved one of her hands dismissively as she explained, “Much as I’m sure I’d just _love_ the taste of darkspawn blood if given half a chance, I simply thought traipsing through the countryside called for a wardrobe a bit less… _distinctive_ than, say, my full Champion’s regalia. I know, silver isn’t really in my preferred palette, but I _do_ think the blue helps to bring out the color of my eyes.”

“It _does!_ ” Varric laughed, the looks on Carver’s and Cassandra’s faces threatening to turn it into a full-blown guffaw. “What? Are there dissenting opinions?” Hawke bumped him with her hip, her own shoulders shaking with laughter, and quite frankly, there wasn’t a feeling like it in the world.

Seeing that things had settled inasmuch as they were going to, Harding shepherded the rest of the scouts back towards their lean-to with a brief hand motion. “I take back what I said before,” she said in a quiet aside, pausing for half a step before she passed him by, “I guess there really _is_ something to the whole ‘follow the blood’ joke, huh?”

He dropped her a wink as if to say ‘Told ya so,’ and then let her be on her way, knowing there was probably a fair amount of packing that would need to be done before they could leave.

“What was that?” Hawke asked, leaning over just enough to pantomime a secretive exchange of illicit information. “Not gossiping about my impromptu flight back there, I hope?”

“It _was_ an impressive distance to be flung,” he said thoughtfully, “But not _everything’s_ about you, you know.” Varric laughed as she let him know exactly what she thought about that, rolling her eyes and scoffing in disbelief, and again that wave of relief, of comfort, of _jubilation_ at having her safe and sound threatened to knock him flat. Instead of letting that happen, he did what he’d been dreaming of since Kirkwall, taking her hand in his and squeezing it tight. “I missed you,” he said, still unable to keep from grinning, something about the curve of her smile positively contagious, “If that wasn’t _immediately_ obvious.”

She took it upon herself to lace their fingers together, her thumb moving gently across his glove as though to reassure herself she was actually feeling it. “You know, I wasn’t quite sure _how_ to read the passionate, frantic kiss back there, but now that you’re saying it, I suppose it makes sense…” She laughed again, and it was only then that he noticed the first hint of tears welling in her eyes. “I missed you too. _More_ , in fact.”

And, feeling like he’d be grinning like a love-struck fool for the rest of his days, Varric pulled her close again. “Doubtful, Hawke. Incredibly doubtful.”


End file.
